
The Organizer of the Civil Rights Movement
By MICHAEL ANDERSON
November 9, 2003
Bayard Rustin became famous for working behind the scenes. This paradox of his celebrity was, to a large degree, inherent in the role he chose to play in the history of his time. From the end of the Great Depression to his death in 1987, at the age of 75, Rustin was the ''master strategist of social change,'' as the historian John D'Emilio writes in his biography, ''Lost Prophet.'' The tactics of public protest that became familiar in the 1960's -- marches on Washington, Freedom Rides, sit-ins, passive resistance, civil disobedience -- were pioneered and refined by Rustin two decades earlier. Indeed, through his decisive influence on Martin Luther King Jr., whom he instructed in the philosophy and tactics of Gandhian nonviolence, Rustin created the model for the social movements of post-World War II America -- civil rights, antiwar, gay liberation, feminist. ''He resurrected mass peaceful protest from the graveyard in which cold war anti-Communism had buried it,'' D'Emilio writes, ''and made it once again a vibrant expression of citizen rights in a free society.''
On four continents, he was esteemed for his mastery of nuts and bolts: ''precisely the number of toilets that would be needed . . . how many doctors, how many first-aid stations, what people should bring with them to eat in their lunches.'' Rustin played major roles in two defining social protests: the Aldermaston march in England in 1958, in which 10,000 people demonstrated against nuclear weapons, and, most famously, the March on Washington in 1963, in which a quarter-million people (more than double the anticipated turn-out and including fully 1 percent of the country's black population) turned out, evidence of a national consensus in support of black rights. The result of eight frantic and exhilarating weeks of work, in which, as D'Emilio writes, Rustin ''had to build an organization out of nothing,'' the March on Washington epitomized why Newsweek called him ''a genius at organization.''
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